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Ann Cleare's "Mire |...| Veins" at the Festival of New Trumpet Music

by Ted Gordon on
Sept. 15, 2016, 2 p.m.

New York's FONT - the Festival of New Trumpet Music - has been pushing the boundaries of brass music since 2003, and this year is no exception. In an abundantly-programmed concert on September 23rd at The New School, Michael Gurfield (principal trumpet for Signal Ensemble and Alarm Will Sound and co-founder of Deviant Septet) has chosen works by contemporary American composers Matt Marks, John Altieri, and Liza Lim, as well as Europeans Vinko Globokar and Mauricio Kagel. But we're most interested in his choice to present a work by a composer not so easily categorized— mire|...|veins, by Irish composer Ann Cleare.

(audio: excerpt from mire|...|veins)

Commissioned and premiered in 2013 by Ensemble Apparat in Berlin, this work deconstructs the brass ensemble into three separate groupings that, in Cleare's words, "unknowingly amount to a ball of raucously unfolding moments." The French Horn, in a grouping of its own, "posseses an all-seeing, transmitting and connective capability" between the other players. The horn gradually unveils an extraordinary hybrid sound (mixing the instrumental tone with a whistle placed at the roof of the mouth), which infiltrates the ensemble.

Brooklyn Brass Quintet performs mire|...|veins as part of FONT at The New School on September 23. Cleare will also see a performance of her ensemble work Dorchadas in Ireland on September 20th, with Alan Pierson leading the Crash Ensemble as a part of "Composing the Island: Love and Death", a concert series presented by RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.